


Interlude: Learning Trust

by josephina_x



Series: Friendship Is... [2]
Category: Smallville
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, pre-Clex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 18:59:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3300203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What the heck was Clark thinking when he went upstairs and left Lex downstairs, alone, in the living room with his spaceship? (--Read to find out! :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interlude: Learning Trust

**Author's Note:**

> Title: Interlude: Learning Trust  
> Author: [josephina_x](http://josephina-x.livejournal.com)  
> Fandom: Smallville  
> Pairing: Clark, Lex  
> Rating: PG  
> Spoilers: general through 1x14 (Zero), with mild references up through late season 5  
> Word count: 2300+  
> Summary: What the heck was Clark thinking when he went upstairs and left Lex downstairs, alone, in the living room with his spaceship? (--Read to find out! :)  
> Warnings: Un-beta'd.  
> Disclaimer: Not mine, not-for-profit.  
> Comments: Yes, please! :)
> 
> Author's Note: Wow. Yeah. This was waiting in the queue a long time. I wrote this around the same time as Spooky Stuff, _way_ back in 2011, but I didn't post it because it needed editing. ~~...Technically, it could still use more editing (I'm not real satisfied with all the super-long run-on sentences, even though it's kind of the style of the original piece), but... well, I'm posting it anyway. So there :-P~~ I am so done with this waiting in my queue. Edited as much as it’s going to be anytime soon, and posted.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark felt nervous leaving Lex downstairs. Very nervous. 

Mostly it was for leaving Lex alone, period. He'd disappeared Lex's fairly ruined clothes on him while he was in the bath, and was more relieved than he wanted to admit that Lex's cellphone wasn't working. It was dead, dead and more dead, wouldn't even turn on, and Lex couldn't have called anyone on it if he'd tried. Or texted. Or emailed. Or took surreptitious pictures and sent the incriminating photos to slightly-perturbed scientists the world over, thrice.

Then Clark had felt guilty that he'd checked. And was keeping an ear out. Because he had had a bad feeling that Lex might do just that the minute Clark's back was turned.

The power might still be out, but the landline wasn’t, and they didn’t have a cordless set in the house. The phone still worked just fine.

But while he felt relieved that Lex hadn't been able to do so before -- from his reactions so far it obviously hadn't occurred to him yet to _really_ try -- he could tell when Lex was lying or being evasive. Even when he was in fine form, and even in his current state, Lex hadn't so much as twitched in the general direction of the doors or tried for any sort of outside communication method while he was in the kitchen. Whatever his current state was.

So he could probably count on not having squads of scientists or hordes of armed security personnel descending on the farm anytime soon, or at least not tonight. Assuming he was able to keep Lex away from the landline.

God, everything was so screwed up.

What was worse, so much worse, was that Lex didn't really seem nervous or freaked out in any real way yet(?), just... vaguely excited and somewhat blown away. Maybe all the other shocks he'd survived, especially today, had pushed Lex past the point of his ability to deal for awhile, and maybe Lex simply wasn't capable of reacting to any new shock with any surprise right now, but Clark just didn't know. This was so far outside Clark's comfort zone it might as well be in outer space -- ha. ha. -- and his own experiences and ability to deal with anything _remotely_ like this were so subpar that he was oscillating between a blank numbness, extreme frustration, and a strong urge to run screaming to his parents in Metropolis before things got any worse.

It was bad enough that Lex's physical state was so messed up right now -- if Clark had understood him correctly, Lex must have been out _walking_ in the freezing wind and rain for nearly a half-hour before he'd arrived at the barn. He'd been soaking wet when he'd arrived, too; then he’d collapsed once on the porch, had nearly collapsed again inside the house but for Clark's quick reflexes catching him before he'd tilted over. He'd looked better after the warm bath, but only marginally, and for all that Lex said he'd never been sick since the meteor shower which had claimed his hair in an odd kind of equivalent trade, Clark was sure that he'd be showing the symptoms of a cold by the next morning. He'd seen his parents sick before, and they usually got muzzy-headed before they had a full-blown cold; applying the same principle to Lex, it seemed like an appropriate parallel to draw.

So, now, Lex was down to what Clark considered a normal state for everyone else -- not Luthorian at all (whatever that was; Clark still wasn't sure) -- and only barely Lex-like. It was as if Lex had been somehow reduced to the essence of himself -- geeky, emotionally unsure, but still holding on strong despite and _in_ spite of everything -- those glimpses of an unguarded-him that Clark had seen at odd times for mysterious reasons now magnified to encompass the whole. Clark doubted that Lex's reduced frazzled mental state was just from the multiple emotional shocks, though, even as bad as they'd been.

Clark sighed and ran a hand through his hair, then grabbed a change of clothes from his dresser drawers and headed back to the bathroom where he'd started to draw another bath.

He didn't really want to take one, certainly didn't need one, but he doubted Lex would let him get away with just a hot shower (it wasn't like Lex wouldn't be able to hear the water running from downstairs). As it was, even after taking the bath, it would be difficult enough trying to explain away the eventual comparisons Lex would be making between the difference in their physical states after the fact, once he was thinking clearly again.

Clark sighed again as he closed the door behind him, set his change of clothes down by the towels, and stripped efficiently. He slid into the tub and felt a little startled as he felt the warmth of the water. He usually couldn't tell much difference between hot and cold -- it certainly didn't bother him, really -- but today was apparently a little different. Maybe the frigid rain had had some minimal impact on him after all...?

He slid lower in the tub to nose level, closed his eyes, and kept his ears open. He could hear Lex shifting around downstairs a bit, but not talking or anything, so that was probably a good sign. That meant that he probably wasn't on the phone. After about a minute, Clark ducked under the surface for a moment and rinsed his hair, then came up for air again -- even though he really didn't need to; he could hold his breath a long time. He began to scrub at himself a little with some soap and counted down the minutes to getting out of the tub and drying off. He was a little twitchy from everything, but also beginning to get a little bored at basically doing nothing while Lex was roaming around downstairs, basically unsupervised. With nothing else really to think about, Clark found himself picking back up his somewhat disturbing previous line of thought: Lex, and what would happen when he was back to normal...

...because Lex really wasn't firing on all cylinders, just then. Clark knew this and despaired to think of what would happen once Lex was back to his usual highly-observant, extremely-inquisitive self again. Lex might've originally jumped to the head-banging conclusion that the spaceship had been something Clark had _found_ , not something Clark had _arrived in_ , for now -- operative phrase being _for now_ \-- but Clark doubted that Lex wouldn't revisit that point once he was well-rested and feeling better. And while that had been some of the most terrifying few seconds of Clark's teenaged life right there -- when he'd thought Lex had actually put it all together and was accusing him of being an alien... Instead of feeling relieved that Lex had gotten it wrong (for now), he was honestly pissed off and felt more _frustrated_ than anything that Lex hadn't realized the truth after all, right then. Having Lex figure things out in half-measures was going to kill him by degrees, if it kept going like this.

...At least, that was assuming that Lex calling up Lionel and/or a various assortment of mad scientists -- who could probably figure out that he was allergic to meteor rock -- didn't kill him all-at-once instead, with all sorts of scalpels and lasers and crap in an impromptu alien dissection-cum-autopsy. ...Assuming that he actually could die.

Clark shivered despite the warmth of the water, and only just remembered to remove his hands from the sides of the tub right before he accidentally curled his fingers and cracked the porcelain under his grasp.

Soaking in the tub quickly devolved into an exercise in keeping his eyes open as long as possible, because it was as though something dark had come loose in his head, and he kept seeing flashes of scenarios too scary for nightmares unspooling behind his eyes every time he blinked.

He shook his head and breathed out, and tried to tell himself that Lex wouldn't give him up like that. Maybe he'd want the spaceship examined by professionals -- did they even _have_ professional spaceship examiners on Earth? and, if they did, would that mean that there were other alien spaceships out there that had needed examining besides his? -- but once Lex realized Clark was an alien... he wouldn't want Clark _dissected_ , would he? ...Clark wasn't sure about whether Lex might want him caged, though -- he was dangerous, he knew it. He even scared himself sometimes with what he could do.

Of course, there were probably alternatives that Lex might come up with that Clark hadn't even thought of. ‘Being completely unrelated to the spaceship’ was definitely a new one that Clark had never considered before. Thinking ‘Clark was a meteor mutant’ was a pretty obvious one, though, and one that could also end in disaster and Clark being locked away -- in Belle Reeve, though, instead of a medical lab that would give even Freddy Krueger nightmares -- but that was only if Lex did decide that that must be it _and_ actually followed through on it, regardless of how wrong he would be.

There wasn't a minute of an hour of each and every day that went by without Clark wishing he was human, that he would wake up in bed and find he'd dreamed up that fateful crash on the bridge and everything that had followed, but at least being an alien sure beat being a psychotic murderous meteor freak. Probably.

Clark sighed and splashed his hands back and forth a bit, just under the surface of the water. He wondered if a quiet Lex downstairs was something to worry about; it didn’t sound like Lex was moving around anymore, just breathing, mostly.

His thoughts turned a different direction, and Clark felt guilty again about Lex getting surprised with the spaceship in the first place. Partially he felt that way because he'd not come in the house earlier and taken care of things the way his parents would've wanted, or even thought to check. But mainly he felt that way because now Lex had gone through something similar to what he had gone through himself, not too long ago -- a near-fatal encounter that should've killed him, followed by a completely unexpected spacecraft reveal later by someone he'd trusted not to lie to him about important things like that. Clark wouldn't have wished that on anybody, not even his worst enemy (Whitney). Though where Clark had gotten deathly afraid and angry and shut down and ran away when confronted with everything, Lex had gotten excited and elated and opened up and stuck around; mentally Lex had pulled back a little, but only because he'd gotten very... thoughtful?

Clark honestly felt ashamed. He tried to console himself with the fact that Lex wasn't exactly trying to cope with being an alien himself, though, like Clark had had to, so maybe _that_ was why his reaction had been so benign so far. And Clark's really painfully direct and, in retrospect, really _stupid_ question, which he'd asked to try and get Lex to share how he would have reacted had that been the case, had thankfully been completely misinterpreted.

Clark decided he'd finally been soaking in the tub long enough for Lex not to be too suspicious of him -- or maybe send him back upstairs again -- and clambered out while pulling the plug. He started toweling himself dry, and as he redressed he had the fleeting thought of tying Lex up in chains and locking him in the storm cellar until his parents were home and they could all decide what to do about things.

Then he was horrified with himself and shoved the idea straight to the back of his mind. He wasn't going to hurt Lex or threaten him, dammit, and he didn't trust his dad (or mom) to be entirely rational about things -- especially after what had happened to the herd recently, and how they'd responded to that (badly). When they found out that Lex now knew his secret…

...or _if_ they found out?

Clark bit his lip and thought about that, almost tentatively. _That_ was certainly a new thought. He thought, and thought...

Clark shook his head and started toweling his hair a second time, then dropped the towel in the growing ‘wet’ pile before tugging on his shirt.

He'd figure something out. Lex kept his promises, so maybe if Clark extracted a promise from Lex not to tell... well, that'd be the first step. Second step would be convincing Lex to stay the night so Clark could keep an eye on him, both to monitor the mental shock and to keep an eye on Lex's physical condition. Between the general trauma, head trauma, cold rain, and looming cold-flu-thing Lex had most likely caught, Clark figured that Lex could use some looking after for a bit.

Clark wasn't sure what to do after that, but he seriously doubted that it was a good idea to let his parents find out how much Lex now knew.

...No. It really wasn’t. And they'd lied to him before through misdirection and withholding of information, so... If they ever found out about Lex knowing, then it was going to be a pot-kettle-black situation and -- you know what? -- Clark could totally deal with that. If they tried to get mad about it, he was totally going to call them on their BS.

Clark, now fully clothed once more, gathered up his dirty laundry and towels and tossed them in the hamper. Then he scooped up his flashlight, which had been the only light in the room -- and all that he'd needed to see comfortably enough to maneuver. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, steeled himself, and headed back downstairs for his next confrontation with his friend, who hopefully was not going to be a _former_ friend by the end of it.

~*~*~*~*~*~


End file.
